The Greek's Surprise Christmas Bride

by Lynne Graham

  Letty had invited Panos, pointing out to Leo that the grandkids were a great source of distraction for the older man and that, apparently, he enjoyed Christmas shopping. And, seemingly, she planned to be doing a great deal of shopping, even though it was only November and Christmas had never started for Leo before Christmas Eve, when a last-minute dash settled all his requirements.

  ‘But I’ve got so many people to buy for now and no credit limit!’ Letty had enthused with starry eyes and not a hint of the greed Leo was accustomed to seeing in a woman’s face. He knew that Letty was already imagining the pleasure she could give to others with her gifts and he frowned at that oddity and yet smiled at the same time.

  Even so, his entire family abandoning him sucked, Leo conceded grimly. Like rats leaving a sinking ship, they had left him alone, the wagons circling Letty as though she were a bonfire on a winter’s day. A text arrived on his phone and he glanced down at it, his jawline hardening as he recognised that he had a small problem from his more eventful past that required handling...and not with gracious tact either.

  In the week that followed, Leo had a great deal to think about because he was still coming to terms with what his father had confessed about his marriage to Leo’s mother, Athena. Having his assumptions about both parents so brutally rearranged had shaken Leo, reminding him that he had been a clueless six-year-old when his mother, Athena, died, giving birth to his sister, Ana.

  Athena had been an extremely wealthy heiress, an only child of the Romanos dynasty with an authoritarian widowed father. Part of the marriage settlement had entailed Panos’s agreement to assume the Romanos name on the marriage. On their wedding night Athena had admitted that she had only married Panos because her father had threatened to disinherit her in favour of his nephew if she did not marry and have a child. She had also disclosed the truth that, having been abused as a little girl by a long-dead uncle, she had no interest in sex but would engage in it solely to conceive as she too longed to have a child of her own. Leo’s father had been urged to seek sexual pleasure elsewhere by his bride.

  Learning those facts had utterly transformed Leo’s image of his father, whom he had long tended to view rather as a fortune-hunting adulterous gigolo who had taken advantage of a naïve heiress. Ironically, if anything, it was his father who had suffered rejection from the woman he’d loved and who had continued to love the troubled woman until she died.

  Katrina had come after Athena’s death, not before, as Leo had always believed and his father, overwhelmed to find himself apparently wanted and loved at last, had fallen fast and hard and had swiftly remarried, hoping for a more normal marriage. By the end of that admission, Leo had sympathised with the older man, understanding, as Panos did not, that he had been targeted by Katrina, who had assumed he was much richer than he truly was. The family trust had ensured that Athena’s children inherited virtually everything that had been hers, limiting his father to only an ongoing income from the estate while he was raising his two children and, after that, a considerably smaller income.

  In short, Leo was suffering a great deal of regret when it came to his father. Panos had been stitched up in the marriage settlement by Leo’s wily grandfather, duped into his first marriage and had then fallen madly in love with a mercenary and unscrupulous woman. Yet Leo had never reached out to the older man and had never offered him financial help, had, effectively, never done anything but judge on false premises and found Panos wanting. That awareness sat on his conscience like a giant weight and he would have liked to discuss it with Letty, only she wasn’t there and the wretched house echoed with her absence...

  * * *

  In contrast to Leo, Letty, initially, had a wonderful time back in London. She enjoyed a most successful interview relating to her return to medical school and was assured of her place the following year. Her mother was slowly becoming fully mobile again and it had transformed her life. She was ready to return to being the active, interested parent whom Letty recalled from her younger years and she was quite overpowered by Leo’s generous signing over of the lovely apartment, where she was now living in comfort. It was a challenge for Gillian to grasp the extent of the Romanos wealth but a visit to her daughter’s marital home in London helped to dispel her misapprehension that her son-in-law had spent money he couldn’t afford to spend on her.

  Her half-brothers, on the other hand, had converted to their new lifestyle with an enthusiasm that was slightly embarrassing to Letty, but the sight of Leo’s games room in the mansion provoked them into excited whoops of rare teenage enthusiasm. Assured that her family’s future was now rosy beyond belief from what it had been only weeks earlier, Letty could only be happy at what her marriage had achieved for those she loved.

  Panos, meanwhile, had found a compassionate listener in her mother, Gillian, because both of them had suffered the misery of having an unfaithful partner. At the same time, Panos, having recovered from the first shock of Katrina’s betrayal, was already moving on and was very much occupied getting to know the grandchildren that Katrina had rigorously kept him apart from to finally become a loving grandfather to his daughter’s orphaned offspring. He had also admitted to Letty that his new closeness to Leo meant a great deal to him because Leo’s reserve had kept him at a distance for years.

  In the meantime, Letty was resisting Popi’s pleas to put up Christmas decorations in November, so excited was the little girl at the prospect of the festive season. Apparently, her late mother, Ana, had always done so and Letty was tempted but stood firm on the point until Gillian shoved a gossip page under her nose when they were having coffee one morning, ten days after her return to London.

  ‘I think it’s sickening what these journalists try to do to rich men like Leo!’ Letty’s mother opined in disgust. ‘There he is, having a business lunch or a meal with a friend, and they try to make it into something sordid just to get a story!’

  Letty glanced down at the black and white photo of Leo caught in profile, smiling at the woman on the other side of the table, and her breath caught in her throat because it was Dido, the beautiful actress who had pursued Leo with such relentless interest on the two occasions when she had met her.

  ‘She’s an old flame,’ she said and for her mother’s benefit she forced her shoulders into a careless shrug and smiled, keen to hide that she felt as though someone had just planted a knife in her heart. She understood from her mother’s face that she was genuinely worried that her daughter had married a man who slept around, just as her ex-husband had.

  ‘Oh...’ Gillian responded uncomfortably, searching her daughter’s expression for any sign of concern. ‘But you don’t think that—?’

  ‘No, of course not!’ That was when Letty’s previously unexercised acting ability really kicked in and she contrived to laugh to reassure the older woman. ‘Not Leo,’ she declared firmly. ‘He’s not like Robbie in any way.’

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ Gillian agreed with clear relief on her daughter’s behalf. ‘You wouldn’t stand for that.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Letty fibbed with a frog in her throat and a fierce attempt to hold back the shocked tears stinging the back of her eyes as she thought about that prenuptial agreement and Leo’s determination to keep it in place.

  Well, Leo had warned her, hadn’t he? Really, why was she so shocked by what had been written in the stars, never mind imposed in legal terms, even before they’d married?

  Panos wandered in to join the women and Letty took the opportunity to make an excuse and leave the older couple chatting. Inside her chest she could feel her heart cracking down the middle and she went into the bathroom she had been naively expecting to share with Leo as a couple, closed the door and broke down into sobbing misery.

  She would allow herself thirty minutes in which to grieve the loss of hope and faith which she had just endured. Leo had been with Dido and no way could she credit that it had been innocent when she was awa
re that the actress was so desperate to regain his interest. Dido was the sort of woman always ready to pounce on an available man and, evidently, Leo was still available. He had been unfaithful to her, exactly as she had feared. Deal with it, she told herself fiercely...but how?

  She needed to protect herself, needed to be strong and, ironically, being with Leo, living with Leo and challenging him had made her stronger, she acknowledged wryly. She was tough as old boots, she told herself; she could do it.

  After all, nothing had gone the way she had expected in their marriage. First, they had been in agreement that their marriage would be sexless and then Leo had changed his mind and changed her mind as well. She had then swung back on the defensive once she’d appreciated that Leo was still not willing to surrender his freedom to sleep with whomever he chose. For the space of a week they had been extremely polite to each other, but that week had concluded with her breaking her promise to herself that he had to remain faithful and she was now thinking of that thoroughly wanton joining on the office desk of Leo’s new club. Recalling that episode her face burned, and it burned even more when she looked back on the sensual indulgence of that last week she had spent on the island with Leo.

  They had been like rabbits, she thought shamefacedly, her entire body tightening and heating in acknowledgement of her own weakness. She hadn’t been able to keep her hands off him. It was not as though Leo had been sex-starved at the time of her departure, it was not as though there were any kind of excuse for his meeting up with Dido again. Maybe there was such a thing as sex addiction, the celebrity excuse for misbehaviour, but the suggestion of rehabilitation wasn’t one she felt equal to tackling with Leo. He would probably just laugh, she reflected, stricken, because evidently he saw sexual freedom as one of life’s necessities and he was determined not to live any other way.

  And that was the guy she had knowingly married and fallen crazily in love with, she reminded herself with dogged honesty. He had been upfront on the fidelity score from the very beginning.

  Her head was starting to ache and she checked herself in the mirror, appalled to see how red her nose was and how swollen her eyes were from her giving way so freely to her distress. Yes, thirty minutes of self-pity was all she would allow herself for hadn’t she agreed to the marriage? And wasn’t she very happy with what that marriage had achieved for her family?

  Yes, she was.

  And if she divorced Leo she would lose the children and she loved them too. Occasional access to Popi, Sybella, Cosmo and Theon would not compensate any of them for such a brutal severance. The children would suffer, and she did not have an automatic right to write off their need for her as a mother simply because marriage to Leo was turning out to be more of a nightmare than she had innocently foreseen.

  Life wasn’t that simple, she acknowledged ruefully. The innocents in her family and his would be hurt by her departure from Leo’s life. If she broke up with Leo, her mother would want to sell the apartment she lived in and return the money to him because that was the sort of woman she was. Accepting such a massive gift from a member of her family, as Leo currently was, was one thing but retaining it as the proceeds of a very short-lived marriage would strike Gillian as something else entirely.

  So, she had to be tough and adapt to being married to an adulterous husband, didn’t she? She would stay married to Leo. She would hide her hurt and act as if everything in the garden was rosy and wonderful because only then could she keep everybody around her happy.

  Her eyes misted again just when she was managing to use concealer on her eyes and she blinked rapidly. On one level she didn’t want to live like that but just then she didn’t feel she had much of a choice unless she was prepared to destroy everything that their marriage had achieved...

  And just as Panos had required a distraction from his depressed thoughts about his broken marriage, Letty registered that she needed one too. Leo phoned her every day and while, only hours ago, she had been longing for his arrival in London, now she was considering it fortunate that it would be a couple of weeks before he returned. His absence would give her time to come to terms with his infidelity in whatever way she could, and she had to stop loving and missing him as well because that was an even worse recipe for disaster and she would have to live in a continual state of being hurt and disillusioned.

  So, step one in her own necessary emotional rehabilitation, she told herself in her mirror reflection, was to stop loving Leo, step back, look after herself... That was the sensible approach.

  By the time she was descending the stairs it was lunchtime, Leo’s father and her mother were still chatting and Popi was home from school, proudly displaying a homemade Christmas card with drawings of her family that made Letty crack up in genuine appreciation. Ana’s children were learning to see her and Leo as their family unit and she was proud of that achievement and resolved not to damage it with what she told herself would be selfish oversensitivity. She would cope with his infidelity because she was tough, she reminded herself doggedly, but she wouldn’t continue to sleep with him. They would have the convenient marriage he had first wanted while she devoted herself to raising the children and completing her studies. That way she would preserve her dignity and her strength.

  As for the distraction she sensed she currently needed while she came to terms with the effective end of her intimacy with Leo, she decided to go for an over-the-top Christmas to delight the children and keep herself busy. Christmas was going to start in November for them, just as it had when they had still had their birthparents. And she was going to buy a family dog and buy a present for Leo, even though he didn’t deserve one. Yes, she would be treating him perfectly normally by the time he flew back from the US, doubtless having sampled various other female bodies during his time away from her, she told herself sourly. He would not even suspect that anything was amiss with her. She would be solid steel and calm and quite unbothered by what she had discovered...

  * * *

  Leo arrived home on the first day of December and so unrecognisable was his home he almost walked straight out of the door again. A scruffy terrier rushed up to him, sniffed him thoroughly and then retreated to bark as though he were an intruder. That was odd enough, but the transformation of the entrance hall could only put him in mind of a Christmas grotto gone mad. There was not an inch of space left because everywhere he looked there were glittering trees, giant stuffed reindeer and elves, stockings and tinsel and holly and decorations. A log fire roared in the grate of a fireplace that had never been lit before. He had vague memories of his sister’s house during the festive season but even his kid sister, bless her heart, hadn’t gone for anything quite so magnificent or...extreme.

  Leo smiled though, registering that Letty treated Christmas as an explosion of glitter and good cheer, which was probably exactly what the children loved. He did notice the absence of mistletoe though, just as he noticed that the warm welcome he had subconsciously expected from his wife was missing. At that point the children came rushing downstairs and he was greeted with all the enthusiasm he could’ve wished for, attended by cries of ‘Unc’ Leo’ and ‘Daddy Leo’, because evidently the children hadn’t yet made up their minds what to call him.

  Of course, all his conversations with Letty on the phone had somehow always turned into conversations about the children. No matter how hard he had tried to take those talks in a more personal direction, he had been redirected to discussing his nephews and nieces. The whole time he was away he had felt starved of Letty, as if she was a presence that could only be pinned down and enjoyed when she was face to face with him. He had sensed the difference in her attitude towards him; he did not consider himself an imaginative man and it bothered him, seriously disturbed his usual rock-solid assurance with women. Something was badly wrong with Letty and that brought him out in a cold sweat of anxiety that he had never experienced before.

  ‘Where’s Letty?’ he asked with a rather fak
e smile when his father and mother-in-law appeared in the doorway of the drawing room.

  ‘She had to rush out for something and she took Theon with her,’ Gillian imparted anxiously. ‘I did warn her that she might miss you but she’s got so into this Christmas stuff—’

  ‘It’s wonderful that she has,’ Leo commented, not having failed to notice that he had three happy kids bouncing and chattering at his side when only months earlier they had all been subdued and tense. ‘How are you doing, Dad?’

  ‘Oh, I’m feeling much more myself,’ Panos Romanos assured him with a grin and a hand that Leo noted, surprisingly, had been anchored on Gillian’s slim hip. ‘Friends and family, that’s what my life is all about now.’

  Bit more than friends, Leo reckoned by the very sociable way the older couple kept on exchanging glances. ‘I’m disappointed Letty’s not here,’ he admitted. ‘I mean, I’ve been gone for weeks and—’

  The front door opened, and Letty blew in with the baby clamped to one hip. ‘Leo, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here!’ she carolled because their respective parents were standing there as an audience and she didn’t want either of them to suspect that anything was amiss between her and Leo.

  Passing over Theon to the nanny at the foot of the stairs, whereupon he wailed like a banshee in protest, Letty stripped off her coat and gloves and feasted her attention on Leo. Still absolutely gorgeous, clad in a cashmere overcoat on top of one of his exquisitely well-fitted business suits, he still took her breath away. That was a disappointment, she allowed, because she had tried to make him less sexy in her recollections, worked hard at trying to make herself less vulnerable. But there he stood and even travel-worn and badly in need of a shave, stubble outlining his wide sensual mouth and somehow accentuating his fantastic bone structure and oh, those eyes... Well, they certainly weren’t the windows of the soul, she scolded herself. His eyes were spectacular but they had to carry a hint of an innately manipulative and secretive personality, she instructed herself. After all, this was the man she had spent pretty much most of a week in bed with, striving to be the sensual woman every man was supposed to want and crave...and where had it got her?